CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

OUR MOTEL HAS always had a high average, in comparison with other motels, of repeat business. Part of our success in drawing customers back again and again has been due to the fact that our motel is new and that we make a point of keeping it spotless; part of our success in this direction has been due to the deluxe service rendered by Grant, who acts the part of general handyman par excellence. The goodwill of the customers, that intangible thing so vital to any business, we make a special effort to capture. The customers are legion for whom Grant has fixed minor mechanical defects in their cars or traveling equipment, or whose cars he has pushed down the highway until they would start. I often think he is so helpful more from a spirit of natural kindness than from a mercenary sense of good business. One time the occupants of a car, after learning our rates, declined to stay. Their car, however, declined to leave. After the driver had tried for several minutes to start the motor, muttering beneath his breath curses that seemed directed toward the battery, Grant good-naturedly got into our car and pushed them around off the driveway, onto the highway and on the road to our competitors.

Occasionally we get customers who are traveling with a house trailer. Their usual explanation is, "We wanted the comfort of a real cabin for once!" Sometimes we have customers who are so pleased with the accommodations that on a repeat trip they bring us a little gift. The most valuable--and most annoying--of these gifts was a half dozen baby chickens, which were presented to David. Grant fixed a small, inconspicuous yard for them behind the single cabins, but they developed a sly technique for getting out when they were hungry. Since they were supposed to be David's responsibility, and since he is a typical forgetful boy, they were frequently hungry. Often when I showed a prospective customer cabin 7, which was the closest cabin to their yard, the chickens would appear suddenly, to perch on the threshhold and watch me with ravenous, reproachful eyes. It lent a very quaint and rural aspect to the proceedings.

The excuses people use for getting away without renting a cabin may not be rural, but they certainly are quaint. It seems to be almost impossible for most people to refuse frankly to rent a cabin, to admit outright that the cabin isn't suitable or that the price is too high. Most people seem to feel that they must offer some logical excuse to get away--and that then, once they have escaped, they needn't return. Typical excuses are that they "have to run to the other end of town a minute first, and will be right back" or that they'll "grab a bite at a restaurant and come back to sign up inside half an hour."

After one trip to a Banning department store where I tried many little coats, all too expensive, on Donna, I found myself making excuses to the attentive salesgirl. "I'll go home and think about it," I said, "and I might come back and buy one." Of course, I knew perfectly well that I wasn't going to buy one of the coats at those prices. I tried to analyze my own reasoning in making the excuse, so I would understand what motivated the customers who fished up frantic excuses so that they could get away.

They must feel guilty, I decided, for using so much of my time and courtesy without repaying me for it; they want to justify themselves in my sight, even if falsely and temporarily, by leaving me under the impression that my trouble will be repayed when they return from "the other end of town" or from "grabbing a bite in a restaurant." They'd be embarrassed if they knew how clearly I understood that they had no intention of returning--as embarrassed as I was when, after thinking it over, I realized that the clerk in the department store knew perfectly well that I had no intention of coming back after "going home to think about it," and that I was just easing myself out gracefully, trying to keep her from thinking I was the ungrateful wretch I actually felt myself to be.

Banning, on the whole a sane and level-headed little town, isn't without its cult members and its intense haranguers about "vibrations."

The vibrations were, no doubt, very strong in these dabblers in pseudo-metaphysics when the members of the Los Angeles Temple of Yahweh bought about nine hundred acres in the desert east of Banning, announcing that they would build there a settlement to be known as Yahweh Springs. Spokesmen for the sect revealed, for the edification of Banningites, that Los Angeles would be blown up by an atomic bomb in the near future, and members of the sect were taking advantage of their special knowledge to build a refuge in the desert.

On a trip to Banning's well-stocked library, I was searching the Encyclopedia Britannica for "Mother Carey's Chickens," in order to use correctly a reference to them in a farcical story I planned to write about a sea voyage. Whenever I look up a certain thing in a reference